Saturday

We went to a story telling festival in Martineau gardens today. The final story was a Levantine folk tale about people are afraid of the truth but love stories, so every story should contain some truth.

Jeremy Corbyn is the weary truth-teller the media have ignored. I don't know if I blame him for being ignorable, or the monolithic media - who have learned that all attention is good attention and so the best way to damn a labour leader is to silence them. Plus, how vile his party were towards him destabilised the whole party.

He is a leader who was supposed to have unified his party as pro-European. Europe is usually the downfall of the tories, the issue that exposes how fragmented and infighty they are. Labour officially declared as 'remain', and yet allowed individuals to argue the other way, apparently without looking turbulent. But then, labour didn't look anything throughout the campaign. Sitting back and letting the tories tear themselves apart looks like it could have been quite a good strategy. Unfortunately, the result is that the bullshitters won, virtually unopposed.

The emergence of the scatter-shot-bullshit politician, in the age of big data, is an absurdity that should not stand. Fact-checking organisations, Programmes like 'more or less', shouldn't be fringe news, they should be mandatory. Corbyn took his authority from an educated position, compared with anti-intellectual tories, who dismiss racism and innuendo as 'the rough and tumble of politics'. He spoke honestly, and when he countered the bullshit coming from Cameron, was ignored with attacks on his appearance.

The victory of 'leave' shows us people listen to strong stories. Corbyn's absence from headlines shows us the truth is not enough. We need a labour leader with not just the truth of the sold-out generation, but the anger of them too.

The working class of this country have been abuse and neglected by their governments, then set loose on a bystander, like a tortured dog attacking the first thing in sight rather than the person who has been twisting it for years.

I think we need a labour leader with the outrage to make the headlines but the academic clout to back it up. We need John Hurt as the War Doctor; not the one we got in the 50th anniversary special, who actually was a bit of a Corbyn, but the one we were promised: a soldier who had the bravery to do what it takes against an abominable foe. We have to face the fact that Blair is the only labour leader to have won an election in - what is it now - 40 years..? We need a war bastard. Can Corbyn be that war bastard?

But I don't think it'll make any difference. In the fight for votes, the tories and the anti-labour papers will still rubbish whatever labour says, regardless of the truth. They can make a story of any strength they like, because they are not bound by the truth. Do we just have to wait until Rupert Murdoch dies?